IL's Biggest 15: Parity

Inside Lacrosse is celebrating 15 years of being The Source of the Sport. To commemorate our 15th year, we're counting down the biggest 15 stories of the IL Era. Coming in at No. 5 is increased parity.

A colleague who hadn’t covered lacrosse in five years came back to work the 2005 NCAA Quarterfinals at Homewood Field. As he was packing up his things at the end of the day, he said, “I left lacrosse a few years ago, came back for one day and I’m still covering Hopkins and Virginia going to the Final Four.”

That afternoon, it was hard to imagine Final Four runs for Massachusetts (2006), Delaware (2007), Notre Dame (2010 and ’12) and Denver (2011) and a national title for Loyola (2012).

Instead, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, lacrosse had become like a never-ending loop of “Gilligan’s Island” episodes.

The question “Did you ever see the episode where they almost get off the island only for Gilligan to mess it up at the last minute?” was replaced by, “Did you see Princeton win that one-goal playoff game?” and “Did you see the team try to run with Syracuse for three quarters and then get blown out in the fourth?” and “Did you see the recruits Hopkins and Virginia landed?”

As college lacrosse looks ahead to the 2013 season, parity exists in several forms.

More schools are adding the sport and are doing so with full scholarships and respected coaching staffs. Coaches at Denver, Bryant and Furman have led previous teams to the Final Four and to national titles in Denver’s case.

Richmond’s new program hired the offensive coordinator of the defending national champion; and an impressive list of candidates fought tooth-and-nail for jobs at Jacksonville, Boston University, Marquette and High Point, among others.

Among existing programs, at least a couple of coaches who participated in an informal straw poll this past fall believe Providence in particular appears poised for a renewal with more funding and new facilities and Mount St. Mary’s is not far behind.

“I’m seeing [parity] in recruiting battles,” says Brown coach Lars Tiffany. “BU, for example, I’m hearing their name much earlier than I would have hoped to in competing for players. There’s no question the game is growing, but it’s also growing competitively.”

Whether parity will reach the tug of war at the very top of the sport is another question.

Loyola forced its way into the conversation with an excellent coaching staff, new facilities and a team epitomized by hunger on the field and accountability off it.

But is Loyola the model to follow or an exception? Virginia coach Dom Starsia believes lacrosse programs from schools that field football teams in BCS conferences will always have a head start thanks to facilities, training rooms and academic support in place for large, financially well-supported athletic programs.

“There’s no question Loyola and UMass and Ohio State and several other schools are much better than they used to be,” Starsia says. “There are any number of programs that are capable of rising up and having unbelievable seasons. … At the same time, for UMass and Loyola and other places like that, it’s really hard to compete with the resources [BCS schools] can bring to bear.”

Tiffany is a former assistant at Penn State and he believes the non-BCS schools accentuate the advantages of being part of smaller athletic programs.

“Look at the defending national champion,” Tiffany says. “Schools that have institutional support at a smaller setting, you can do some things maybe a big school can’t, without the bureaucracy you get in a state institution.”

Automatic qualifiers to the NCAA Tournament and the expansion of the tournament field in 2003 have helped bolster the profile of smaller programs and have given them more even footing in recruiting.

(There have been rumors among coaches and administrators since late last spring that there is a chance the tournament will expand again, to 20 teams. It is unclear whether the spate of conference realignment that, at least for now, have decreased the number of conferences with enough members to qualify for an automatic berth will affect any putative tournament expansion.)

Parity also exists in early recruiting – or in programs that fill their spots with high school sophomores and let late-developing players slip through the cracks.

As one coach whose program does not often participate in early recruiting once said, “We’re choosing the best 17-year olds, not the best 15 year-olds.”

Says Tiffany, “More mistakes in recruiting could lead to parity.”

Says Starsia: “The early piece of [recruiting] has forced us to make some decisions earlier than we would like to. It leaves a lot of gems out there to be discovered later.”

Yet even in recruiting there exists a question about how much parity exists.

An axiom among many college coaches is there are six or seven high school seniors who could play immediately for any college program. And the sport’s insiders believe not only that the number of impact freshmen has not grown, but also the majority of those six or seven still annually gravitate toward Johns Hopkins, Duke, North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland.

In the last 15 years, there has been a much-needed increase in parity in college lacrosse. In a 2002 interview, Starsia said he was in favor of granting automatic qualifiers to the NCAA Tournament to smaller conferences because it would help tear down the distinction between the sport’s “haves and have-nots.”

There is no question that distinction has been blurred, if not totally eliminated.

Overall, however, Starsia recalls his days as a player and coach at Brown and compares them to his current spot at Virginia.

In the Ivy League, “they almost said, ‘We want you to be good in sports but don’t want you to admit it,’ “ he says. “Here it’s, ‘We want you to be good in sports; how can we help you do that?’”

Quint's Take

In the last 10 years, only 13 different teams have appeared in Championship Weekend. In the last 10 years, five teams have won NCAA titles. Loyola and Duke won their first gold trophies in men's lacrosse. Those stats aren't overwhelming; they are a slight historical improvement.

The reality is that less than a dozen schools have the talent and coaching necessary to win the NCAA title this year. Those programs continue to set the standard, but the exciting aspect is that the pack of schools on their heels is growing rapidly. And Loyola's rise could be the harbinger for mid-major teams during the next decade. Keep in mind that the Greyhounds went from an 8-5 non-playoff team in 2011 to an 18-1 national champion.

The data that I find most compelling for the parity argument is this:

In the last two years, 24 different schools have qualified for the NCAA Tournament. Considering that we utilize a 16-team, single elimination bracket...that's significant. Twenty-four teams in two years shows that it is difficult to win your league AQ in back-to-back seasons.

Even more eye-opening is this:

Since 2008, 31 different programs have qualified for the NCAA Tournament. Thirty-one is a huge number. That's basically half of the schools who play Division I lacrosse.

I think it shows that the AQ system is working. And that kind of strong number also encourages growth in new programs - ramp up the commitment and we too can play in May. Schools like Michigan, Marquette and Boston University didn't add lacrosse to be perennial losers. Over time, they are going to step up and want a piece of this postseason action and some screen time on the big stage.

Simply put, more schools are investing more into lacrosse. They are paying their coaches more money, those coaches are working harder, schools are investing in strength and conditioning programs, and asking their players to fully commit to winning.

It's also proof that high school lacrosse, nationwide is producing more and more really good players, who don't always end up playing for the super elite teams. Late bloomers often go unnoticed by schools like Johns Hopkins, Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland, which recruit high school freshmen and sophomores. And that high school talent in non-hotbed locations is catching up to the ortheast.

Upsets during the regular season are a weekly happening. Look at some shockers from 2012; some teams who had super seasons stubbed their toes along the way.

Within the NCAA tournament brackets, we've consistently seen very few first-round upsets. But the quarterfinal round games have been tightly contested; there isn't as much separation between teams 1-8 as there used to be.

Parity at the top? I wouldn't characterize it that way. But we've seen tremendous parity in the mid-tier (teams ranked No. 10 - 35) with 31 schools playing in the NCAA tournament since 2008. And that's an exciting scorecard. Parity is a trend with positive momentum.

Check back to InsideLacrosse.com as we count down all 15. Want some input or have some feedback? Email mattkinnear@insidelacrosse.com.

Also, get ready for IL's 2013 slate of events: March 9 at the Whitman's Sampler Independence Classic (St. John's-Syracuse, Lehigh-Penn State and Villanova-Penn) at PPL Park in Chester, Pa.; March 16 at the Whitman's Sampler Mile High Classic (Denver-Notre Dame and Loyola-Air Force) at Sports Authority Field at Mile High in Denver, Colo.; March 23 at the Konica Minolta Face-Off Classic (Johns Hopkins-Virginia and Colgate-Navy) at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore, Md.; and the Konica Minolta Big City Classic (Syracuse-Notre Dame and Cornell-Princeton) at MetLife Stadium in E. Rutherford, N.J.). And don't forget IL's Powerball Lacrosse Tournament, July 12-14 at Richard Stockton College near Atlantic City, N.J.